Ed from the Open Rights Group writes, "The Conservatives have won an absolute majority in the General Election. The Home Secretary Theresa May has already said that she will use this majority to pass a new Snoopers' Charter."

The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the EU, has invalidated the European Parliament's Data Retention Directive, which required phone companies and ISPs to store your clicks, email subjects and to/from info, your location data, and other sensitive "metadata" for up to two years. — Read the rest

UK Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron says that ISPs and phone companies should be required to store records of every click you make, every conversation you have, and every place you physically move through. He says that communications companies should be required to make it impossible to keep your communications from being eavesdropped in, with mandatory back-doors. — Read the rest

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for your viewing pleasure include:

• Sweet, nostalgic film about a magic trick.

• Russian paratroopers deploy inflatable Orthodox church.

• How to: Build a better sand castle. — Read the rest

Professor Elemental receives a commission from the government to build a marvellous snooping machine.

Britain's Communications Data Bill — AKA the Snooper's Charter — would effectively eliminate private communications in the UK, giving government and the police the power to spy on virtually everything you do online (which is rapidly merging with everything you do, full stop). — Read the rest

City buses across America increasingly have hidden microphones that track and record the conversations that take place on them. It's easy to see the reasoning behind this: once it's acceptable to video-record everything and everyone on a bus because some crime, somewhere was thus thwarted, then why not add audio? — Read the rest

This morning saw the publication of an editorial in The Sun by Theresa May, the UK home secretary, defending her bulk Internet surveillance proposal, the Communications Data Bill, AKA the "Snooper's Charter."

In the article, May cites a submission by by Peter Davies (Chief Executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre) as an example of why all Internet communications should be stored and made accessible to police without a warrant. — Read the rest

The Snooper's Charter is Britain's pending Internet surveillance law, which requires ISPs, online services and telcoms companies to retain enormous amounts of private online transactions, and to hand them over to government and law enforcement employees without a warrant. A public campaign on the bill had 19,000 responses, every one of which opposed the legislation. — Read the rest

Jimmy Wales says that he'll configure Wikipedia to encrypt all user traffic to undermine the UK government's "Snooper's Charter," which will institute bulk, warrantless Internet spying on the whole nation. (via /.)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Legal Director Cindy Cohn was in the UK for the launch of the Snooper's Charter (AKA the Draft Communications Data Bill), and she provides some much-needed global context on the totalitarian slide of the United Kingdom. — Read the rest

The pricetag for the UK "snooper's charter" — a comprehensive warrantless spying proposal from the government — is in: "at least £1.8 billion." This is how the coalition fight crime, even as thousands of police take to the streets to protest cuts in front line patrols, and even as private companies are taking over "policing duties" in cities and towns across the nation. — Read the rest

As the UK government ramps up to pass the snooper's charter — a sweeping, unaccountable regime of tax-funded, warrantless snooping on all online activity — the Open Rights Group is offering workshops across the country on how to talk to your MP about this proposal. — Read the rest

The other shoe is slowly dropping on the "Snooper's Charter" — the proposed UK Internet spying legislation that will require ISPs to harvest and retain fantastic quantities of user activity and make it available to government and law enforcement without a warrant. — Read the rest